Dune (Constellations)

David Lynch's Dune (1984) is the film that science fiction--and the director's most ardent fans--can neither forgive nor forget. Frank Herbert's original 1965 novel built a meticulous universe of dark majesty and justice, as wild-eyed freedom fighters and relentless authoritarians all struggled for control of the desert planet Arrakis and its mystical, life-extending "spice." After several attempts to produce a film, Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis and his producer daughter Raffaella would enlist David Lynch, whose Eraserhead (1977) and The Elephant Man (1980) had already marked him out as a visionary director. What emerges out of their strange, long process is a deeply unique vision of the distant future; an eclectic bazaar of wood-turned spaceship interiors, spitting tyrants, and dream montages. Lynch's film was "steeped in an ancient primordial nastiness that has nothing to do with the sci-fi film as we currently know it," as Village Voice critic J. Hoberman put it--only with time becoming a cult classic. This book is the first long-form critical study of the film; it delves into the relationship with the novel, the rapidly changing context of early 1980s science fiction, and takes a close look at Lynch's attempt to breathe sincerity and mysticism into a blockbuster movie format that was shifting radically around him.

• | Author: Christian McCrea
• | Publisher: Auteur Publishing in partnership with Liverpool University Press
• | Publication Date: Oct 22, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 112 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1911325825
• | ISBN-13: 9781911325826